Various studies project that the number of end user devices connected to the network will grow rapidly. These end user devices are diverse in functionality (e.g., laptops, personal digital assistants or PDAs, gaming consoles, office printers and scanners, music players, televisions and entertainment systems), have different degrees of ease of configuration, and provide different management interfaces. End user devices typically access the Internet using a residential or a small and medium business (SMB) gateway.
When customers experience a performance problem with a device in their residential or home network, their first instinct is to contact Internet service provider (ISP) for customer support. Each service contact that cannot be self-served by the customer costs the service provider approximately on the average of $25 to $50, degrading profit margins for the service provider. Because of the expense and other service or customer related issues, locating the root cause of performance degradation of end user devices is an important issue for service providers. Root cause of degradation may lie in networks of service providers, in a network of the user, or in misconfigured or otherwise faulty end user devices.
Conventional management of residential or SMB networking devices and enforcement of residential-wide or SMB-wide management policies is typically manual, on a per-device basis and error prone. Current methods for locating the root cause either require manual configuration of end user devices or the gateway, or require that the user provide input to a management server. The end users may find configuration difficult or cumbersome; consequently, the end user may not perform the configuration or may perform the configuration incorrectly. Some methods will work without user input, but these methods require that the end user device implement a particular management standard. Such standards are in their infancy and not widely adopted.